Geographical areas of Europe

ip journal

Peter Altmaier and Günther Oettinger discuss Europe’s Energiewende

The EU plans to modernize its public power supply, to create an integrated energy infrastructure, and to take the leap into the era of renewable energy. Is Europe on the right track? And what is Germany’s role? Here are three questions for the Federal Minister for the Environment Peter Altmaier and European Commissioner for Energy Günther Oettinger.

ip journal

What Faustian conclusions can and cannot explain about the euro crisis.

From Germany’s hard left to the ordoliberal right of the Bundesbank, Goethe offers something for everyone as Germany grapples to understand the euro crisis debate. But is the man himself a model of Germanic thrift or a warning of Greek profligacy? Could his texts be the key to understanding the tortured German euro crisis response?

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Clearly, the future still does not look rosy for the Eurozone. But three years into the euro crisis, Angela Merkel, whose global recognition has skyrocketed in the course of the crisis, remains in surprisingly good shape. As many times as worries that the euro rescue will ultimately fail might have kept her up at night over this past year — she doesn’t look it.

British elites have quite suddenly become comfortable with the idea of the UK exiting the European Union in the next few years, and their counterparts on the European mainland seem to have accepted the prospect as well. Continental leaders will not bear Britain ill-will for leaving, at least not if London does it right.

It is not just that the negotiations are highly complex and have many moving parts, or that they condense long-term guesswork about the world in 2020 into a single, big-bang decision. It is that an irrational outcome has essentially been preprogramed.

Londoners are flocking to Berlin these days. During the last two years the Brits calling Berlin or stopping by to chat with Berlin’s political analysts seemed to mostly come from the financial sector. But as eurozone governments have begun transitioning from crisis mode into the messy business of sorting out the longer-term fixes, it’s now Britain's politicians who are showing up in Berlin to discuss Europe.

The EU budget no longer reflects the Union’s main missions and policy goals. In the past, behind farm and regional aid, the items that now dominate allocations, lay the perception that Europe had to ensure its own food supplies and that poorer members had to be bribed to join.

Poor euro. Not welcome on the block. Greeted in the womb as a soon-to-be-stillborn. Feared to be a deprivation for owners of the “good old national money” it replaced. Caricatured as the “teuro” (cost-inflating euro) despite conspicuously lower inflation in the euro era than in the decades before. Belittled in 2000 to 2002 because of its declining external value (versus the US dollar).

The Czechs too have written a new security strategy—and demonstrated that their, Europe’s, and America’s strategic statements are parallel and compatible. “Old” and “new” Europe should not fall into the contrary assumption that their approaches must clash.

The phoenix is once again rising out of the ashes of the failed Cyprus talks. A year after Turkish and Greek Cypriot negotiators walked out on the draft United Nations plan for reuniting the divided island, the leaders of the two communities have resumed their contacts on the basis of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s comprehensive proposal of a loose federation.